The great advantage
which I enjoy here is the remarkable facility afforded me for work
which has become a prime necessity to me, and which, considering
my internal condition, is also a duty. The lectures on morals
are excellent, but I cannot say as much of those on dogma, as the
professor is a novice. This, coupled with the great importance of the
_Traites de la Religion et de l'Eglise,_ especially in my case, would
be a very serious drawback, but for my having found substitutes for
him among the other professors." As a matter of fact, I had a special
liking for the ecclesiastical sciences. A text once implanted in my
memory was never forgotten; my head was in the state of a _Sic et Non_
of Abelard. Theology is like a Gothic cathedral, having in common with
its grandeur its vast empty spaces and its lack of solidity. Neither
to the Fathers of the Church nor to the Christian writers during the
first half of the Middle Ages did it occur to draw up a systematic
exposition of the Christian dogmas which would dispense with reading
the Bible all through. The _Summa_ of St. Thomas Aquinas, a summary of
the earlier scholasticism, is like a vast bookcase with compartments,
which, if Catholicism is to endure, will be of service to all time,
the decisions of councils and of Popes in the future having, so to
speak, their place marked out for them beforehand. There can be no
question of progress in such an order of exposition. In the sixteenth
century, the Council of Trent settled a number of points which had
hitherto been the subject of controversy; but each of these anathemas
had already its place allotted to it in the wide purview of St.
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